


Assignation

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Solstice stories [6]
Category: Castle
Genre: Engagement, F/M, Long-Distance Relationship, Phone Calls & Telephones, Romance, Solstice, Summer, Summer Solstice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-21
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-05-16 02:15:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19308586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: They have a date.





	Assignation

**Author's Note:**

> Set during Valkyrie (6 x 01) after the accepted proposal, but before Castle's impromptu visit to DC. 
> 
> I just can't resist a solstice, I guess? This is sort of doubling up. Sleeping Bag technically occurs on the June 2013 solstice, which this does as well. This is kind of self-soothing, though, as I just got up to The Limey in Dialogic Season 4. I hate this period of the show, and my thoughts are usually really dark about it. I thought I'd try to challenge myself to write into a different headspace.

 

They have a date. _A date a date a date a date._ The words tap out a cadence inside her head, a counterpoint to the headache she has going from the humidity, from the lack of sleep, from the information she’s working every moment to cram into her head about federal statutes and org charts and which Metro line is the least smelly and crowded at which time of day.

They weave a rhythm beneath the erratic melody of her keys as she pushes her way through the apartment door. _A date_. She doesn’t look at her watch or any of the glowing clocks on the microwave, the bedside clock, the DVR she hasn’t once touched.

 _No such thing as late._ His voice, fond and kind and—oddly and mercifully—a little disgruntled joins the chorus. _Let’s do fewer “sorries,” okay?_

She pulls off her clothes, and it’s haphazard for her—blazer tossed over the back of a chair right inside the door, trousers folded in half once and tossed over the wingback in the corner of the bedroom. She liberates her bra from inside the thin shell that was only moderately too hot for today’s swampcast and casts it aside to fall where it may.

She dives on to the bed, enjoying the chill that’s seeped into the bedspread. She’d remembered, for once, to take advantage of the fancy smart thermostat he’d had installed and cranked the bedroom temperature down from among the throng of bodies on the Metro.

She spares a few seconds to unhook the chain from around her neck and slip the ring—her ring—free. She closes her fingers around her mom’s. It’s as different as it’s possible to be from the heavy diamond she slides on to her finger, yet the two are inextricably linked for her.

“Hey, Mom,” she whispers. “Guess who’s got a date?”

She hooks the chain again. She drops the ring inside her shirt, next to her skin, and presses itagainst her sternum. She dials and hurriedly arranges herself into a sultry pose. Well, as sultry a pose as she can manage in a slightly sticky short-sleeved number and a pair of two-days-past-laundry-day panties. Still, she flings one arm overhead and holds the phone high above her body, as far as the other will go.

His face appears almost instantly. It jerks and drags for the first second or two as the connection establishes itself, but his smile is wide and bright from the get go.

 _“Well, hel-lo_ , _Agent Beckett!”_ he says, flicking his eyes up and down the length of her body in a bit of Tex Aver–level ogling.

“Hey there, stranger.” Her voice is breathy and low. She’s answering in kind and bending the rules. There’s a apology already tucked between the letters of the last word and she can’t help but break the fourth wall. “I’m sorry it’s so late.”

 _“Late?”_ He doesn’t drop out of his hard-boiled character, but there’s a little scowl between his eyebrows that makes her laugh. It’s a warning she wants to press her lips to. _“Plenty of daylight left in the naked city, doll.”_

His face disappears. There’s a flip of black, faster than a blink, and there it is. The city. _Home._

“You’re on the roof!” she exclaims. Her chest, her stomach, the bones of her wrists, her ankles all fizz and flutter with a mix of excitement and longing. “You’re not in the Hamptons.”

 _“Nah.”_ She hears it now, his voice mixing with the traffic and the low-key _whoosh_ of the light evening breeze. _“Too itchy.”_

“Itchy,” she echoes. She tries to parse out what that means. She needs to see his face for that. She wants to see his face, but she’s hungry for the city, too. “Let me see the sunset.”

 _“That_ is _the sunset!”_ The camera swings a few degrees to the east, as she knew it would. _“Look! The Empire State Building, and the Flatiron’s there somewhere.”_

“Castle!” She’s laughing even though her tone is sharp. They’ve had this argument a hundred times before. “Sunset. Now.”  
  
The camera flicks black for an instant and there’s his face again. _“You show me yours . . ._ ” He trails off in a leer.  
  
“I’m in bed,” she grumbles, but her legs are already shifting to the side. “I’m in my _underwear_ —“

 _“Oh, I know, Agent.”_ He shifts the phone so it looks like he’s peeping down over a wall or something. _“Believe me_.”  
  
“There’s nothing to see.” She flips the camera around and lets it jerk up and down as she tromps with heavy, mock-sullen steps across the bedroom. Her hand is on the heavy curtain when she realizes that the window doesn’t face west. She takes a second to orient herself and tromps back the way she came. “It’s stupid Virginia. There’s nothing to . . .”

 _“Whoa,”_ he breathes. The sky is shades of orange and velvet blue and lilac that she hardly has words for. The trees she doesn’t know the names of are black against it. There are clouds here, scudding along on a more insistent breeze. _“Kate, that’s gorgeous.”_

“It is,” she says, trying just to mean it in the moment. Trying not to kick herself for the fact that she’s pretty sure she’s never looked out this window before. Trying to be where she is, not where she’s not. “Not a bad date spot.” She shifts her gaze to him, at his smiling face framed by the phone against the gorgeous backdrop. “Now mine.”

 _“Yours.”_ He rolls his eyes, but his hand swims into view as he thumbs over to the other camera. _“Fine. Here you go. But it’s not a sunset. It’s New Jersey.”_

“It’s my sunset, and I only get”—she casts a distracted glance at her watch—“four more minutes of it.”

 _“Six minutes after that where you are,”_ he says softly. 

The both fall silent, then. The traffic swells around him as he holds the phone steady. He’s right, of course. The view straight west is a ridiculous, gap-toothed thing, utterly unimpressive compared to the one facing north, but she loves this one, warts and all. She misses it. She misses him and the familiar sights and sounds of home.

“Six minutes?” She shakes herself out of the melancholy moment. She studies the sunsets, superimposed, a moment of beauty within beauty before she flips the camera again to eye him skeptically. “Really?”

 _“Really,”_ he says, craning over the top of the phone. It gives her a view of his hairline and one eye on a crazy slant. _“Six whole more minutes of daylight there today.”_

“You wanna see again?” She hesitates with her finger over the icon.

 _“I’d rather see you_ ,” comes his swift reply.

“Me, too. I’d rather see you.” She waves a tiny goodbye at the sunset and makes her way back to the bed. She crashes to the mattress and props the phone on the pillow next to hers. “So,” she says, waiting for his face to center on the screen. “Too itchy for the Hamptons?”

 _“Yeah.”_ He shrugs. There’s nothing hidden in it. No tension at all and she feels a little of her own leave her body. _“It’s not where the book is right now.”_

“Right now?” She shivers a little. It’s as if the room has gone from cool to outright cold as the last of the longest day slips away. “But it has been?”

“ _Has been. Will be, I think.”_ She watches his gaze travel inward, then snap back to her. _“You’re trying to trick spoilers out of me.”_

“As if!” she scoffs. “You know how I feel about spoilers.”

_“Yes. You like to torture me for them, then torture me again when I give them up.”_

“Castle.” She grins. She does love to torture him, in multiple senses of the word. “I have explained the rules very clearly. I only really want to know if I give the safe word.”

 _“You are bad at safe words, Agent Beckett_.” He pouts outrageously into the phone. _“That is_ not _how safe words work.”_

“Is too.” She sticks her tongue out at him and he gives a low growl. She feels a pang of complicated longing. “You’ll go when the book _is_ there, right?” she asks in a rush of breath. “You’re not _not_ going just because . . .”

 _“Because . . .?”_ he prompts gently with another miniature scowl.

“Last year. We went to my dad’s cabin, and we said we’d trade off.” She hangs here head. “We were supposed to be in the Hamptons together this year.” 

 _“Kate, that’s not it at all.”_ He looks at her straight on, though he’s in motion. He’s moving across the roof and she pictures him settling with his back against the low wall that surrounds the tiny garden. _“I’m writing a bunch of things—different pieces—and they’re all here. That’s all it is.”_

 _  
_ “Ok,” she says, closing her mouth around the doubts crowded inside. Swallowing them down, because that’s what they’d agreed to do. “But next year—first day of next summer—we spend it in the Hamptons.” She nods sharply. “No take-backs,” she adds, as though he’s arguing.

He’s not arguing, though. He’s smiling, unclouded, with the lights of the city twinkling behind him.

“No take-backs.” He nods, too. “First day of next summer. It’s a date.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading.


End file.
